#31: Lunacy

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Good morning!

Around 11:45 a.m. yesterday, New York went from sleeping to partying inside a single minute. My block in Brooklyn exploded in cheers, honks, and fireworks. In Manhattan people swung from scaffolding, jumped on cars, cried and hugged in the middle of the street. I’ve been cynical about Biden from the start (still am), but have to admit it felt good. Public celebration has seemed so remote and impossible this year; I forgot what it felt like to be part of a collective that wasn’t angry. There’s still so much wrong with this country that this presidential race has not and was never going to address, but for now, for a day or two, I’m going to let myself bask in the unlikely news that, just this once, Trump lost.

Here’s an essay I wrote over the course of last week while we waited to hear the results.

Lunacy of Another Kind

At some point over the summer, Avi discovered that HBOMax had all 31 seasons of the original Looney Tunes. We watched the first couple episodes semi-jokingly; we wanted to remember the characters and conjure the feeling of being seven years old on a Saturday morning. But our ironic detachment quickly gave way to enthusiasm. Looney Tunes was hilarious—the animation outrageous, like nothing we’d seen in years, and the storylines even more so. That first night we watched something like 10 episodes. And ever since, we’ve started putting them on at random intervals—as a treat for completing a boring task, or to procrastinate, or just to cheer ourselves up. The episodes run around six minutes, which happens to be the perfect length for a cartoon, Quibi notwithstanding. We’ve probably watched 40 or 50 now.

The first episode of the original Looney Tunes debuted in 1931, and the last in 1987 (although reboots and remakes persisted through the ‘90s). But there is a sweet spot, from 1938 to 1964, when the look of the characters, the way they move and interact, is the most exemplary of what made Looney Tunes so special, at least to me. These are the episodes directed by Chuck Jones, an iconic and award-winning animator whose style you might recognize even if you’ve never heard of him: Imagine Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff, pausing in the air as his predicament dawns on him—eyes bulging in alarm, feet scrambling in search of solid ground—before he plummets to the earth and disappears in a puff of smoke. In a documentary about Jones’ influential work, Extremes and Inbetweens, people like John Lasseter, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Lorne Michaels, Robin Williams, and Roger Ebert weigh in on his genius and cite him as an unparalleled creative force.

Jones used to say the difference between a laugh and no laugh could be as small as a single frame.

The Looney Tunes universe, populated by Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Wile E. Coyote, the Roadrunner and so many others, doesn’t follow the same rules as ours. You can be blown up by dynamite and dust yourself off. You can unfold a piece of paper into a door then walk through it. Bodies can inflate like balloons, or flatten like pancakes. Gravity pauses. It has a physics of its own, and it’s always to one character’s benefit and the other’s peril. In its heyday, Looney Tunes, with its absurd animation, zany characters, and irreverent storylines, was the perfect, ironic counterpart to the much more earnest and precious Disney. In “Duck Amuck,” a 1953 episode Jones has cited as a favorite, Daffy argues with the person animating him, bating them into erasing parts of his body and manipulating the space around him. It’s more fun to watch Looney Tunes as an adult, when you’re seasoned enough to appreciate that kind of absurdity. The show is beautifully arted and scored, too, often using abstract shapes and patterns as background imagery and live orchestras for drama.

Although I’m partial to Bugs, some of the best episodes star Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner. These episodes—always set in a Grand Canyon-like rockscape—are without dialogue and feature the most insane tricks of the series. The schemes themselves are always ridiculous (Coyote throwing a boulder onto the other side of a seesaw to try to catapult himself across a canyon where the Roadrunner is standing), but it’s how they fail that is hilarious (the boulder is so heavy it blows through the seesaw and the ground below it, creating a hole that Coyote then falls through). They never fail exactly how you think they’re going to fail, and it always happens faster or slower than you expect.

Fundamental to Looney Tunes is the fight between good and evil: Most often, one character is trying to catch and eat another using increasingly creative tricks. Most crucially, the prey always outsmarts the predator, everyone survives, and the characters’ motives persist from episode to episode. In this way there is a satisfying and consistent logic to Looney Tunes, even as the details are delightfully unpredictable and unbound by physics. You know justice will prevail, you’re just not sure how.

There are plenty of reasons I could be drawn to a show like Looney Tunes right now: nostalgia, distraction, an easy laugh. But this past week, as I watched the US election results unfold in the messiest way possible, I realized it was more than that. For all its lunacy, Looney Tunes is fun to watch because it understands something about human nature: our desire to see justice served. And it exploits that by following a very simple formula—the roles are established, the stakes are understood, the outcome is satisfying. It’s not without its chaos, but never so much that the logic of the world is undermined. Americans meanwhile, can’t seem to unite on a single idea. And what makes that particularly frustrating isn’t the mere fact that we disagree—opposition isn’t inherently destructive—but that we are drawing conclusions using different information and different logic. “Well, one thing is clear: You can no longer deny that…” says everyone on Twitter, followed by an exponentially growing array of conclusions that simply cannot be true at the same time.

It’s maddening to watch. And not just because it’s discordant, but because it undermines the basis of human communication, which asks that we agree on certain facts and build from there. Imagine debating the Pythagorean Theorem with someone who doesn’t believe that 1+1=2, or that geometry is useful. When Wile. E Coyote runs off a cliff, he’s always going to fall. If he didn’t, the fabric of the Looney Tunes world would unravel. This is essentially what’s happening in American politics. It’s been happening for a long time, maybe all along, but it’s never been so true as it is today. As the country endures overlapping crises, our attention infinitely splinters, and our institutions become increasingly governed by the uber-wealthy whose interests thrive on eroding solidarity, it’s no wonder the world feels like it’s falling apart. There’s very little holding it together.

I’m happy that it seems like Biden is going to win, and I believe he’s done so fairly. But I don’t believe the same could be said of the primary, nor do I believe he will adequately address most of the issues plaguing America. This combination of beliefs, which to me seem based in fact, puts me at odds with several groups of people who see themselves as similarly rational and moral. As much as we’d like to imagine our enemies are willingly cruel or ignorant, it’s more likely they simply have a different definition of those words, and see themselves as accordingly good. This I actually find comforting; watching Trump supporters decry fascism in the wake of voting fraud accusations has served as an unexpected and welcome reminder that there remains a thread of commonality between us, however laughably remote. What we all want is truth and justice. If only we could agree on who, where, when, why, and how.

Looney Tunes understands our most basic drive and satisfies it over and over. The perpetrator fails (or softens). The victim thrives. Justice is served not by punishing the bad guy in any long-term sense—they always survive another day, spirit intact—but by giving the good guy the last laugh. Perhaps this is satisfying because we understand the plight of the pursuer and the pursued, and just want everyone to be okay in the end. In that sense, no matter how absurd the details, each episode of Looney Tunes reveals a fundamental truth about its audience, making the series an optimistic work of art.

Post-publish addition: This Vulture piece that explores the 11 “erased” Looney Tunes episodes that were pulled from the air in 1968 due to depicting racist themes (one of which was directed by Jones). I was sad to learn about these after this newsletter was published and am sorry for the careless oversight. I plan to explore this more in the podcast this week.

1. This week’s Small Good Thing is this minuscule snail a reader recently spotted while listening to the Maybe Baby podcast on a walk.

2. This episode of Looney Tunes, called “Feed the Kitty,”about a dog falling in love with a cat.

3. “Trump Should Have Lost in a Landslide. The Fact That He Didn’t Speaks Volumes,” a piece by Nathan Robinson for The Guardian that lays out the problem with the DNC’s insistence on pushing the party right in clear, simple language: “The Democrats do not need to propose insipid half-measures when the data indicates that the public are fully on board with a progressive agenda.” (An eerily similar piece: “Light a Fire Under the DNC,” by Peter Moskowitz for The New Inquiry following the 2016 election.)

4. My (very short) interview with CoolStuff.NYC, which I agreed to purely because I loved the website and URL.

5. Free Solo, finally, because I felt like being anxious for two hours for reasons other than the immediate circumstances.

6. “Harmony Holiday on Finding Quietness in a Loud World,” a beautiful piece by Harmony Holiday for Frieze about quiet moments in Black music. “Where complete silence can be frigid and mortified, quiet resurrects and builds on murmur, gasp, brush, innuendo: intentional incompletion that holds space for accompaniment but does not require it.”

7. The surprising fact that the Op-Ed page was “named for its geography—opposite the editorial page—not because opinions would be expressed in its columns.”

8. The deeply off-putting realization that Cheer (that Netflix show about professional cheerleaders) came out THIS YEAR. In January.

9. “Where Despots Rules,” a fascinating interview with Elizabeth Anderson about how the modern American workplace mimics private governments—even dictatorships—and why that’s a problem. 

10. This sauce pan (in cream) from Equal Parts, which is making me want to cook against all odds.

11. If you live in Brooklyn: Carmenta’s spicy rigatoni, which might be the best pasta dish I’ve ever tasted (and I got it delivered!).

12. This Fresh Air interview with the comedian Maria Bamford about her OCD, which a reader recommended to me after reading last week’s newsletter (and which I mentioned in last week’s podcast).

13. “Ariana Talks Dirty on Positions,” Lauren Michele Jackson’s New Yorker review of Ariana Grande’s new album, which I’ve been listening to like a good student.

14. My hands-down favorites news item of 2020, which is that Trump’s team held a press conference yesterday at Four Seasons Total Landscaping—a drab landscaping business in Philadelphia that has no relation to the Four Seasons hotel, unbeknownst the whomever (accidentally) booked it.

15. This particular combination of songs, if you happen to share a few life experiences with me (including age?) and want to be in a good mood immediately:

That’s all folks! Thanks for reading.
Haley

This month a portion of subscriber proceeds will be redistributed to Palante Harlem Inc, a New York-based nonprofit working to reduce poverty, end tenant exploitation, and advocate for safe housing in Harlem.

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